Customer service on Social: Time to get your act together

With more than a bil­lion peo­ple now using social media world­wide, it’s not a ques­tion of whether brands will offer ded­i­cat­ed cus­tomer ser­vice options on social but a ques­tion of when. Even if brands choose not to join in the con­ver­sa­tion on social, their cus­tomers will still be talk­ing about them – the good, the bad and the ugly.

Social media gives brands valu­able cus­tomer insights and the chance to gain new insight into what the cus­tomer real­ly needs and wants. Brands should lever­age this and real­ize the impor­tance of cus­tomer ser­vice espe­cial­ly at a time where cus­tomer loy­al­ty is volatile as con­sumers can jump on the inter­net, see neg­a­tive com­ments and reviews, and find anoth­er com­pa­ny to fill their needs. It is not enough just to have a pres­ence on social. Engage with your cus­tomers and the best way to do this is through excel­lent cus­tomer ser­vice.

Some tips on inter­act­ing with cus­tomers on social:

Lis­ten, lis­ten, lis­ten

The best way to under­stand your cus­tomers is to go onto social plat­forms and search for con­ver­sa­tions around your brand. Make sure to expand your key­word search, enter­ing not only your brand name but prod­ucts as well as words asso­ci­at­ed with your brand. Mon­i­tor­ing all the var­i­ous social plat­forms man­u­al­ly is tedious at best and impos­si­ble at scale, so invest­ing in a good social lis­ten­ing tool is nec­es­sary. Adobe Social allows you to mon­i­tor all your social com­mu­ni­ties in one aggre­gat­ed plat­form. Through its very cool (and extreme­ly handy) Twit­ter and Face­book mod­er­a­tion han­dle, you can eas­i­ly do a key­word search to dis­cov­er who is talk­ing about you, how many fol­low­ers that per­son has and can respond direct­ly to the per­son or esca­late it to some­one else in the team to respond, such as a prod­uct spe­cial­ist.

Take Action!

It is not enough just to iden­ti­fy where and what your cus­tomers are say­ing on social, you need to take action if nec­es­sary. If you come across a cus­tomer tweet or Face­book com­ment, espe­cial­ly if it’s direct­ly on your brand page, do not ignore it! There is noth­ing a cus­tomer hates more than being ignored. The num­ber one rule for suc­cess­ful social media cus­tomer ser­vice is action. At least acknowl­edge you have heard their con­cerns and either address it direct­ly or esca­late it to the appro­pri­ate per­son.

Don’t just respond, do it swift­ly.

News trav­el fast on social, so brands need to respond quick­ly, espe­cial­ly with com­plaints. Act­ing swift­ly can stop the fires from spread­ing, and rein­force a brand’s com­mit­ment to cus­tomer care. How­ev­er, this is not an excuse for pan­ic reac­tions – there should be set guide­line respons­es, and staff need to be trained to esca­late poten­tial issues to the right per­son imme­di­ate­ly if a quick response is need­ed.

We’d love your com­ments and feed­back. Do you have any tips for brands and their online cus­tomer ser­vice?

Umang Bedi

Umang Bedi is the Managing Director of the South Asia region for Adobe. In this role, he is responsible for Adobe’s business operations that include growing the sales and marketing functions, driving strategic partnerships and alliances and driving cloud services opportunities within the enterprise, government, education and SMB sector in the South Asia region. In addition, Umang also leads partnerships globally with the Indian offshore system integrators, which are aimed at growing Adobe’s Digital Marketing business across the globe.